One rap on Kerry is that he is overly cautious and conventional. He’s no firebrand on the stump, nor does he come across as the most passionate and exciting force for change. But his history in Washington includes episodes in which he demonstrated a willingness to confront hard issues, to challenge power, to pursue values rather than political advantage, to take risks for the public interest.
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[Discussion of contra investigation omitted.]
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After the contra investigation, Kerry next turned to a far more sensitive target: a bank connected to a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. During their investigation of Noriega, Kerry’s staff discovered that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had facilitated Noriega’s drug trafficking and money laundering. This led to an inquiry into BCCI, a worldwide but murky institution more or less controlled by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. BCCI was a massive criminal enterprise, although this was not yet publicly known. It had engaged in rampant fraud and money laundering (to help out, among others, drug dealers, terrorists and arms traffickers) around the world. Its tentacles ran everywhere. Its political connections reached around the globe. Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger both became involved in the scandal. When banking regulators finally shut down BCCI in 1991, an estimated 250,000 creditors and depositors from forty countries were out billions of dollars.
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The top officials of First American were Clark Clifford, a longtime Democratic graybeard and a party fundraiser, and Robert Altman, his protégé. Democratic senators grumbled about Kerry’s crusade, which put Clifford in the cross-hairs.
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In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, Clifford and Altman (for participating in “some of BCCI’s deceptions”), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was “a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American…for CIA operations.” The report was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since, there’s been nothing like it. Senator Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry’s subcommittee, noted, “John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult investigation. Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did.”
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Investigations were not the only notable moments in Kerry’s Senate career. On September 10, 1996, as he was in a tight re-election contest against William Weld, the popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, Kerry voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, which would deny federal benefits to same-sex couples and permit states to not recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states. He was one of only fourteen senators to oppose the measure. Several leading Senate liberals–including Paul Wellstone, Tom Harkin and Pat Leahy–had voted for it. But on the floor of the Senate that day, Kerry, who noted that he did not support same-sex marriage, said, “I am going to vote against this bill…because I believe that this debate is fundamentally ugly, and it is fundamentally political.”
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The following year, a re-elected Kerry was in another lonely position as one of only five original sponsors of the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, to provide for full public financing of Congressional elections. The measure would remove practically all special-interest money from House and Senate campaigns. (Kerry’s colleagues were Wellstone, Leahy, John Glenn and Joe Biden–all Democrats.) “Kerry was totally into it,” says Ellen Miller, former executive director of Public Campaign, a reform group pressing for the legislation. “He believes in this stuff.”
